In some situations, it can be desirable to recommend particular items in a set based upon a selection of other items in the set. For example, for a set of products offered for sale by a merchant, when a customer has selected one of the products, such as by visiting a web page describing the product, it can be desirable to recommend another one of the products offered by the merchant that is commonly purchased by purchasers of the selected products.
Conventional approaches to generating and presenting such recommendations are extremely limited. For example, conventional recommendation generation approaches are typically very closely tied to a particular implementation of a particular recommendation technique, generally making it difficult to substitute an alternative recommendation technique, or implementation thereof, for an existing technique, and difficult to compare the results of different recommendation techniques or implementations thereof.
Additionally, conventional recommendation presentation techniques often involve displaying a recommendation in response to the display of a particular web page representing an item in the set. This can be a cumbersome interface to use. Additionally, it is an interface that generally precludes the simultaneous selection of several items to be the basis for a recommendation.
Based on shortcomings of conventional approaches to generating and presenting recommendations such as those described above, an improved approach to generating and presenting recommendations would have significant utility.